Rehan has angered his workers who say he has called them
animals and has refused to negotiate.

"The Toronto Plaza Hotel workers
simply don't deserve the treatment they are

getting,” says the letter from Mohamed
Baksh of the United Steelworkers Union.

“Akhtar Chaudary can help end this strike,
but he's done nothing so far.

"Burnbrae can help reach him and we are
pleased that over 1,000 people agree.

"Now it's up to Burnbrae to do the
right thing," says his letter.

A news release from the union also
draws attention to the lawsuit Best Choice Eggs has filed against Burnbrae
Farms, L.H. Gray and Son Ltd. and the Egg Farmers of Ontario marketing board,
seeking $33 million to settle allegations that they have conspired to drive
Best Choice out of the egg-grading business.

The Canadian Pork Council has lost a lawsuit it filed to
retrieve almost $1 million from a Brandon credit union that sold a hog farm to Hutterites after the barns were involved in the Cull Breeding Swine Program in 2009.

One of the conditions attached to the program was a promise
to not put pigs back into the barns for three years.

In this case, Crocus Country Pork Inc. went into
receivership after it received support from the program that was administered
by the Canadian Pork Council.

Westoba Credit Union in Brandon took the land and buildings
and in January, 2010, sold them to a Hutterite colony.

An inspector from the pork council found 2,500 sows in the
barns when he visited the farm in September, 2010.

The pork council filed its lawsuit in February, 2012,
seeking return of the $780,851 paid to Crocus Country Pork, plus a 10 per cent
administrative fee and penalty that was also one of the terms of the program.

The pork council sued the Westoba Credit Union and BDO Dunwoody Ltd., which administered the receivership.

The judge dismissed the lawsuit because he said there’s
little chance the pork council could win against either the credit union or BDO
Dunwoody.

The judge also ordered the pork council to pay Westoba
$11,995 to cover its legal fees and BDO Dunwoody $12,084.

The cull program was designed to reduce the Canadian
breeding herd by 10 per cent, which was about 150,000 sows. At the time North
American hog prices were in a severe depression because of too many hogs coming
to market.

The Ontario Association of Independent Poultry Processors
has been granted status as an intervenor in the appeal the Association of
Ontario Chicken Processors has filed against the Chicken Farmers of Ontario.

The appeal is scheduled for public hearings at the tribunal
headquarters in Guelph on Jan. 22 and 24.

The chicken board has developed a policy to supply chicken
to processors who need supplies to develop niche markets.

The Association of Ontario Chicken Processors has filed an
appeal because it apparently believes the chicken will be taken out of its
supplies.

An alternative would be to persuade the national agency to
grant Ontario the right to increase chicken production, but so far the other
provinces, led by Alberta, have been opposed to any increase for Ontario.

Alberta argues that Ontario ought to allow processors to
compete for available chicken supplies.

Ontario stopped that years ago, deciding instead to divvy up
supplies among processors based on their historic market shares.

The processors have traded their supplies among each other,
often “renting” supply in return for money and sometimes buying a rival
processor simply to gain its right to chickens.

That’s what happened earlier this year when Sargent Farms
bought Chai Kosher Poultry of Toronto, effectively closing the Chai plant and
denying people who want kosher chicken any supplies from Ontario farms. Since
then some of their demand has been met by kosher chicken from a plant in
Montreal, but at higher prices.

The Ontario chicken board asked the national agency for more
chicken to meet the demand for kosher chicken, but has been turned down at
national agency meetings in November and December.

Processors who want to buy chickens to meet the demand for
kosher and Hong Kong dressed chicken were hoping to take advantage of the
Ontario chicken board’s new policy to find chicken for processors who want to
develop new markets. That’s the policy that the large-volume chicken processors
are opposing with their appeal to the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food
Appeal Tribunal.

The Ontario Independent Poultry Processors Association is a
strong supporter of the chicken board’s proposal to find chickens to develop
niche markets.

The AOCP has consistently tried to stifle the association
for small and independent processors. For example, at a hearing conducted by
the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Council the AOCP successfully argued that
the independents ought to be kept from sitting on a chicken-industry committee
designed to develop policies that improve the Ontario chicken industry.

During that hearing, the AOCP said it was on the verge of
finalizing a plan but now, more than a year later, there is still no sign of a
plan for the industry.

Meanwhile there are court challenges filed by CAMI
International Poultry Inc. of Welland to throw out the deal Ontario and Quebec
marketing boards and dominant processors reached to stop trade in live chickens
between the provinces and to change a federal import policy so the company can
import live chickens from the U.S. when it’s not able to buy them in either
Ontario or Quebec.

Only in Canada, and only under national supply management, could such ridiculous marketplace shenanigans take place.

Quebec’s regulations
designed to protect dairy farmers are under challenge from Saskatchewan with
support from British Columbia, Alberta and Manitoba.

They are challenging
regulations that protect dessert toppings and coffee whiteners from competition
by substitutes made from vegetable oils.

A hearing is scheduled to
begin Jan. 8 in Quebec City. Saskatchewan has filed its case under the
pan-Canadian Agreement on Internal Trade.

Somebody ought to tell the chicken industry that the agreement has been found. A judge in Welland said in his decision earlier this month that lawyers arguing over whether the Ontario chicken board can continue to deny chickens for CAMI International Poultry could not find the agreement.

I'll bet the lawyers for the chicken board and Ontario chicken processors weren't trying very hard since they were involved in fashioning regulations to ban inter-provincial trade in live chickens between Ontario and Quebec.

Sean McPhee, president of the Vegetable Oil Industry of Canada, said
oilseed producers support Saskatchewan's trade challenge.

``Our
members look forward to the time when vegetable oil-based alternatives to dairy
products can be manufactured and sold in all parts of Canada,'' he said.

The Ontario has been silent on the dispute. I guess Premier and Agriculture Minister Kathleen Wynne figures that by keeping silent, she might not lose support from either soybean growers or dairy farmers.

Friday, December 27, 2013

The Obama
administration wants to reform its food-aid program so more can be bought
closer to where impoverished people need it.

The American
Farm Bureau has persuaded Republicans in the House of Representatives that the
U.S. should continue to ship food from the United States.

The result is
yet another fight over the Farm Bill that has yet to pass in Washington more
than a year after the previous five-year Farm Bill expired.

That old bill
has been extended for a year, delaying a long list of reforms.

If and when
the World Trade Organization is able to enforce voluntary guidelines on food
aid, the U.S. would be forced to implement the change Obama is proposing.

However, for
now he’s reduced to arguing the logic of donating cash instead of U.S. food.
Canada has been donating cash for years.

Obama says
giving cash would get food to needy people a lot faster and would save 25 to 50
per cent – enough to feed an additional 800,000 people.

The Republicans
managed to narrowly reject the proposal that would account for 45 per cent of
the $1.4 billion a year the U.S. donates to food aid.

The Senate,
which has a majority of Democratic party members, approved a scaled-down
version that would allow the federal government to spend up to 20 per cent of
the $1.4 billion buying food close to where it’s needed.

The House and
Senate are due to meet to try to develop a compromise Farm Bill that will move
to a vote they hope cnbe counted
in late January.

Chandler
Goule, vice president of government relations for the National Farmers Union,
supported a shift to more cash-based foreign aid in the Farm Journal debate. He
said that local cash purchases help support farm economies in developing
countries, which is key to addressing world hunger.

"You
can’t make one program to fit every situation," he said, noting that it’s
often more appropriate to ship food from the United States, especially when
it’s not available locally. But large U.S. shipments can also set back foreign
farm economies.

Mary Kay
Thatcher, director of public policy for the American Farm Bureau Federation,
said her organization "feels really strongly about continuing to ship the
products from here. If the assistance is from the [U.S.], it ought to say that.
We are not for moving toward a cash system."

Goule said he
was given assurances by USAID officials that even if purchases were made in a
foreign country, they would still be delivered in a bag with a USA logo.
"We would still get the message out there that we are helping these
countries," he said.

Tjada D’Oyen
McKennna, deputy coordinator for development for the Obama administration’s
Feed the Future initative, strongly supported the measure in her address at the
conference.

"We
believe that this complements a lot of what we do at Feed the Future to build
local and regional markets," she said. Having the flexibility to make cash
purchases would help the agency establish local sales and delivery
infrastructure. The cash purchases could also be used as leverage to ensure
that local farmers meet quality and production standards. "We are very
eager to see this go forward," she said.

Some days I despair of Republicans ever gaining some degree of wisdom.

The World Resources Institute says the global agriculture
and food industries must change if people are to get enough to eat 40 years
from now.

World population is forecast to increase from seven billion
now to 9.6 billion in 2050, and that means the world will need 69 per cent more
food, says the institute.

It can’t come from the way we currently produce food because
there won’t be enough land, water and energy.

Agriculture already accounts for 24 per cent of greenhouse
gas emissions, takes 37 per cent of the global landmass and uses 70 per cent of
the available water.

If governments continue with current goals for ethanol and
biodiesel fuels from farming, that will take 32 per cent of current production
volumes, yet provide only two per cent of the energy requirements 36 years from
now.

It’s often said that there’s enough food for everybody and
that the challenge is distribution, but the institute points out that even if
all the food we’re currently producing were distributed absolutely evenly to
everybody in 2050, people would be short by 974 calories.

Among the solutions the World Resources Institute identifies
are:

-Reducing
waste which currently claims a quarter of production before crops move from
fields to dinner plates. Eliminating waste would narrow the food gap by 20 per
cent.

-Eating
healthier diets. Reducing beef consumption by 20 per cent would free up a lot
of land to produce other foods, the institute says.

-Reducing
family size, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa where the population is projected
to double by 2050.

-Increasing
cereal-crop yields on the same trend line that currently exists. That would
close the gap by 30 per cent.

The United
States meat industry estimates it is losing $5 to $6 billion a year in meat
sales since Russia banned imports of beef and pork that has been raised with
the help of growth-promoting ractopamine.

That’s a
taste of what Canadian beef and pork producers face because the United States
has imposed mandatory country-of-origin labelling regulations.

The two
sets of protectionist policies indicate why international trade issues are
likely to loom large in the coming year.

On the
positive side, Canada and the United States are involved in the Trans-Pacific
Partnership trade negotiations that are designed to liberalize trade with
Pacific-Rim countries but may have an even bigger impact for Canada on trade
with the United States, particularly if there is any liberalization that will
increase competition in Canada’s dairy and poultry sectors.

The U.S. is also negotiating a trade deal with Europe that
could also have a major impact on North American agriculture.

And there are renewed hopes that the world trade
negotiations can make some progress in reducing trade barriers and subsidies
that are costly follies for the global agriculture and food sectors.

As for the Russian ractompamine issue, Meatingplace Magazine
reports that U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul in Moscow is exerting pressure on
behalf of American meat exporters.

Traffic jams that are costing billions in terms of time and
diesel fuel could be reduced by building more roads, not by investing more in
public transit systems, says Brian Lee Crowley of the Macdonald-Laurier
Institute in Ottawa.

The Ontario agriculture and food industry is experiencing
increasing costs to move livestock, poultry and produce in and out of Toronto
and even a massive investment in public transit won’t improve that situation,
Crowley indicates from data gathered from cities across North America and
around the world.

A study released in August estimated that traffic jams in Toronto increase costs by $11 billion a year.

The Ontario government policy has, however, been to shift
priorities from highway building to public transit systems, including subways
and light-rail systems for Toronto and other urban centres, including the
Waterloo Region.

Crowley points to studies that began 30 years ago at the
Texas Transportation Institute, which is located at Texas A&M University,
and have found that congestion was eased in cities that continued to invest in
highways and roads, but got worse in cities that shifted budgets away from
road-building into public transit.

This puts the lie to urban planners who have said that
building more roads and expressways makes downtown gridlock worse.

Portland, Oregon, ignored those urban planners and spent its
money on more roads and expressways; its ranking for congestion improved from 47th
to sixth in North America.

On a global scale, Crowley writes in the Globe and Mail
today that Canada ranks third in terms of longer commute times because of
congestion - i.e. traffic jams.

The average Canadian commute now takes 25 per cent longer
than necessary.

There are only five cities in North America that are worse
than Toronto.

Vancouver is now the worst in North America and third-worst
in the world.

Crowley concludes with advice for urban planners: “Remember
urban sprawl is not a problem to be solved, but part of the answer to how vast
numbers of people can live together in big cities without life grinding to a
half in traffic.”

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

The Chicken Farmers of Ontario
marketing board has been stuck with a bill of $202,466.70 to compensate André Lamoureux for court costs related
to a lawsuit Lamoureux filed on behalf of French-language chicken farmers in
the Ottawa Valley.

Justice Michel Charbonneau said in his
decision handed down this week that it was a complicated and expensive case for
Lamoureux to file. There were two dozen French-speaking farmers involved.

The chicken board, in Charbonneau’s
words, “threw in the towel” and changed its regulations, effectively allowing
the French-speaking farmers to continue marketing their birds to processors in
Quebec despite an agreement the Quebec and Ontario marketing boards reached to
ban cross-border sales of live chickens.

Charbonneau awarded $170,000.00
inclusive of taxes for fees plus $32,221.02 for disbursements. That came to the
total of $202,466.70.

His decision clearly names the Chicken Farmers of Ontario as owing the money, although some media are reporting that the Association of Ontario Chicken Processors will pay.They might as well since the two were big buddies in instituting the trading ban.

Two neonicotinoid seed-treatment pesticides could harm
fetuses, says a new report from the European Union.

But Canadian officials say our standards are already below
those recommended by the European research team.

Neonicotinoid pesticides are under intense pressure because
beekeepers are certain they are contributing to the death of bees.

The pesticides are popular as seed treatments, particularly
for corn.

Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency has them
under review and has already said current practices are “not sustainable.”

The Ontario corn industry has been responding with promises
to reduce the use of neonicotinoid pesticides and to change management
practices, such as using additives that will reduce the likelihood that the pesticides
will be wafted away like dust.

A study by the European food safety agency indicates that
acetamiprid and imidacloprid neonicotinoids might harm a fetus’s developing nervous
system much as happens with exposure to nicotine.

The study says the chemicals could affect memory, learning
ability and motor use.

On that basis, the study recommends lower human exposure
standards for the chemicals.

The Toronto Star reports that a Health Canada officials says
Canada’s tolerance levels are already lower than those proposed by the European
food-safety agency.

Monday, December 23, 2013

There are lessons that need to be
learned from the closings of the Kelloggs breakfast-cereal plant in London and
the Heinz ketchup plant in Leamington, says Bob Seguin, executive director the
George Morris Centre food-industry think tank at Guelph.

The reasons for the closures are
more complex than media reports suggest, Seguin writes in a report for the
agriculture and food industries.

The closures demonstrate that
investments are necessary to keep facilities competitive, that companies need
skilled workers, that they have to keep up with many changes such as trends in
consumer preferences, packaging, processing and information technologies, and
invest in research and development.

The closures also reflect the increasingly
competitive global environment.

On the other hand, several major
investments have recently been made.

Seguin mentions the Dr. Oetker plant being
built in London, Ont., the many investments in canola-processing plants in
Western Canada, the Premium Brands’ purchase of Piller Sausages and
Delicatessens Ltd. of Waterloo and the $184-million investment Oxford Frozen
Foods is making in wild blueberry processing in New Brunswick.

He could have added Maple Leaf
Foods Inc. investment in a large bakery in Hamilton, its companion investments
in a centralized meat-processing plant at Hamilton and a distribution centre
south of Guelph and a Chinese investment in an infant-formula plant in Toronto.

Seguin says “the primary focus of any significant market or
policy responses must be on obtaining new domestic and foreign investments, and
re-investments in this industry. Entrepreneurial growth and investments (re-investments) in scale and new
technologies must be complementary priorities.

“New investments in developing new and needed labour pools
for a successful food manufacturing industry must be encouraged and spurred.

'The industry’s past successes using traditional sources in rural and urban
Canada are not sustainable,” Seguin says. “New investments in seeking both
domestic and foreign labour as well as improved management expertise (for a
much more competitive marketplace) must be priorities in order to successfully
compete.”

Canadians need to be aware of increasing global competition,
he says. This includes learning from competitors, including the public policy and regulatory supports available to these current
and new competitors, he says.

“The
competitive impacts within a dynamic marketplace must become a critical factor
in the regulatory choices and processes for implementation.

"Improved measures
of results, impacts and effectiveness must become standard if the domestic
industry is to adapt while sustaining public demands for different regulatory
standards,” he writes.

He says public research needs to be better
coordinated with private-sector innovations.

“It is important to build upon past research successes, and
to seek more innovative market and policy responses needed to match Canada’s
innovation investments and successes (real results in the marketplace) with its
competitors,” he writes.

The report is posted on the George Morris Centre website.

I wish he had added another admonitiation to marketing boards of all types and provinces - stop acting only for farmers and start looking into supply-chain innovations and improvements. That might mean yielding centralized marketing-board controls to individual farmers so they can pioneer their own futures.

The
Chicken Farmers of Ontario, the Association of Ontario Chicken Processors and
several of the biggest chicken processors in the province have won a partial
victory over CAMI International Poultry Inc. of Welland.

CAMI
has filed a lawsuit against them, claiming a conspiracy among them to deny the
company enough chicken supplies to satisfy its customers’ demand for Hong Kong
dressed birds.

Justice
J.R. Henderson agreed with the chicken board and processors that there is some
“confusion about what was taken” from CAMI when Ontario and Quebec marketing
boards signed an agreement to ban inter-provincial trade in live chickens.

CAMI
had been buying Quebec birds to keep its customers supplied with about 800,000
birds slaughtered each quota period. After the ban went into effect, it could
only source about 250,000 birds per quota period.

CAMI
argues that the trading ban left the Ontario chicken board with birds that were
being exported to Quebec and it divided those birds among Ontario processors,
but denied CAMI its share.

That,
CAMI claims, violates a number of laws, including the competition act, the
federal-provincial agreement on internal traded, and amounts to expropriation
without compensation.

Henderson
said “there is at least a germ or a scintilla of a chance” CAMI could succeed
on this claim that the members of the AOCP ended up with supplies that should have
been granted to CAMI.

The
chicken board argued that CAMI had no base quota covering the birds it was
importing, therefore the chicken board took nothing from CAMI.

Henderson
disagreed and said CAMI might succeed with its claim that something of value
was taken by the chicken board and distributed to other processors.

Henderson
also dismissed the chicken board and processors’ challenge that there has been
no violation of the Competition Act. That claim, says Henderson “has a chance
of success.”

There
were no arguments presented during this court challenge about the
federal-provincial agreement on internal trade because the lawyers can’t find a
copy of the agreement.

The
main court case is scheduled to be heard in Welland early next year.

CAMI
has filed another court challenge against the way the federal government and
the federal-provincial marketing boards deal with applications for
supplementary import permits.

When
CAMI applied for a permit to import chickens from the U.S. so it could meet its
customers’ demand for Hong Kong dressed birds, the marketing boards said they
could find regular chicken to fill the orders. CAMI is arguing that it’s not
right to deny a supplementary import permit on this basis because the specialty
market is left unfilled.